Rural Hawke’s Bay communities learning feral deer butchery to minimise culling waste

Ainsley Harte, upper catchment co-ordinator for the Between the Two Rivers community group, said she saw a lot of waste in deer culling and thought something could be done about it. Photo / Paul Taylor

A rural Hawke’s Bay group is collaborating with a butcher in Hastings to prevent the wastage of meat during the culling of rampant feral deer population on farms.

Ainsley Harte, upper catchment co-ordinator for the Between the Two Rivers (B2R) community group, lives in the small rural Hawke’s Bay community of Waiwhare and said there were massive issues with the feral deer numbers in the area.

“Every single day we see mobs or have issues with deer jumping into our paddocks and shorting out the electrics and stuff like that,” Harte said.

With her group, she created an initiative to teach locals how to butcher deer that had been culled from farms in the area.

“I didn’t like the idea of someone coming in and just culling all these animals because I see it as a big waste of a resource. While venison isn’t accessible to a lot of people I thought it was a good opportunity to make it accessible to people in our community.”

She said the meat would come from two pilot farms, one of about 500ha and the other about 1500ha.

“Their native plantings are getting absolutely hammered, so this is a good opportunity for them and us, if we can control these deer numbers on their property, to see what the biodiversity can do.”

Contractors will come in to cull the deer using thermal imaging at night, before they drag the carcasses to accessible areas and mark them by GPS for farmers to collect the next day.

Ainsley Harte was told by a deer culling contractor that at least one of the two pilot farms was "riddled with deer". Photo / Paul Taylor

She said some preliminary thermal imaging work with a drone to test deer populations on the farms had been cut short by poor conditions, but in that time they spotted 38 deer in just a single herd close to a boundary between the two pilot farms.

“The contractor was up at the smaller farm not too long ago and ‘the place was just riddled with deer’ is what he said, so I’d say there would be a lot more than 38 hanging around.”

She said Parkvale Butchery owner Mark Liefting was passionate about teaching others butchery skills and had “jumped at the chance” to facilitate their two wānanga (seminars).

Attendees of the butchery seminars will take home the meat and any extra meat will be made into mince, patties or sausages to be distributed into the community based on need or want.

Liefting said he had looked at doing something similar to these seminars for a few years and had previously worked with a couple of farms up the East Coast.

“It is a skill that everyone can use, once you’ve got it, it doesn’t cost anything to do and you can make the most out of what is considered a pest but should really be a commodity,” Liefting said.

At the first two-day wānanga on July 21 and 22, Liefting will teach attendees how to break down the venison into various primal cuts, which parts go into sausages, which are the finer cuts to keep for other things and how to make salami, patties and sausages.

Forest & Bird analysis of Department of Conservation data from 2021 found 96.8% of all indigenous vegetation on mainland NZ and two-thirds of primary production land had at least one non-native ungulate species (such as deer, pigs or goats) living on it.

That year, a single state-owned Pāmu farm in Hawke’s Bay killed 947 feral deer.

A Federated Farmers draft deer population position paper lists a lack of wide-scale commercial venison recovery operations since the early 2000s and increasing habitat for deer from forestry conversion among the potential reasons for the deer population growth.

James Pocock joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2021 and writes breaking news and features, with a focus on the environment, local government and post-cyclone issues in the region. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives in Napier. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz